Introduction
Tolulope Oke was once voted Britain's most outstanding Black student while at Cambridge, and has since led inclusion work at organisations including Accenture, Amazon and Diageo [CHECK: company name unclear in source audio, heard as "Diro"]. From the outside, that is an unbroken run of achievement. From the inside, she describes six to nine month stretches of barely eating, relying on coffee and tea to stay upright, and watching her nutrition, sleep and skin deteriorate while everyone around her assumed she was simply thriving.
Her phrase for it is blunt: my 70% is probably more than someone else's 100%. That is not a boast. It is a diagnosis of exactly how high performers get trapped, because the moment people get used to a 70% that looks like everyone else's best, they stop rewarding it as exceptional and start expecting it as standard.
Growing up as one of four
Tolulope is a quadruplet, the fourth of four, and describes an early life she calls enmeshed: identical schools, identical friendship groups, an entire identity built around being part of a set of four rather than an individual. It was not until university, when the siblings finally attended separate institutions, that she began to work out which parts of her personality were genuinely her own and which were simply inherited proximity.
Being the only Black undergraduate at her Cambridge college
At Peterhouse, Cambridge's oldest college, Tolulope was the only Black undergraduate in a college of roughly 300 people. She recalls overhearing a college administrator refer to her on the phone as "that Black girl" and formally complaining. Her first year was difficult. It was only in her second year, when a larger cohort of Black postgraduates arrived, that the experience began to shift, alongside moving from medieval history modules she found alien to more recent history she could actually relate to.
She is candid that a Cambridge education gave her a level of privilege she has had to actively acknowledge and counterbalance in her later career, including catching herself when recruitment panels defaulted to candidates from similarly prestigious backgrounds.
Leaving banking and consultancy because the work felt invisible
After a banking internship and a graduate scheme at Accenture, Tolulope found the work technically impressive but personally hollow. Moving numbers around on a trading floor, or modelling savings projections that shifted entirely depending on one input variable, left her feeling detached from any tangible impact on another person's life. What kept her at Accenture was side-of-desk diversity and inclusion work, mentoring, university liaison, community network involvement, which is what eventually became her full-time career.
The best complex, and learning not to be grateful for crumbs
Tolulope coined a term in 2015, during a conversation with the civil service, for the psychological trap she saw repeatedly among people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who land a prestigious role: gratitude so overwhelming it stops them asking for what they are worth. She recalls the moment it hit her personally, when she realised that being thrilled just to be included at Accenture meant she had missed that others on better projects were quietly earning more for doing less.
Her response since has been to walk away from roles on principle when pay did not match her value in the market, something she says has earned her 40 to 50% pay rises nearly every time she has left a job over the years.
The physical and mental cost of leading while Black
Tolulope is preparing a LinkedIn series on what she calls the cost of leading while Black, and was candid in this conversation about what that cost has looked like for her: cycles of self-abandonment, deteriorating health, and the particular exhaustion of being constantly compared to mediocrity rather than being allowed to simply be excellent without it being treated as remarkable.
She does not believe in imposter syndrome as it is typically sold, calling it a mechanism that keeps women in particular doubting their own voice rather than trusting it.
Navigating DEI backlash without losing conviction
Asked how she is approaching the current political pushback against diversity work, Tolulope points to a pattern she has lived through before, Brexit, MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Covid, and argues that some of the current backlash is a fair response to inclusion work that was rushed, poorly resourced, or treated as a tick-box exercise after 2020. Her answer is not to retreat but to return to what she calls the brilliant basics: work that is baked into an organisation's operations rather than bolted on as a campaign.
Purpose as the antidote to fear
Tolulope says she is regularly afraid, but rarely stays in that fear, because her sense of purpose behind the work is stronger than any single setback. Her stated bio on LinkedIn is two lines long: she believes the world will change because she has lived, and she believes she can change it one life at a time. That, she says, is enough motivation to keep going even when the wider climate for her field feels hostile.
